mass surveillance

Mass surveillance is the surveillance of all or a substantial fraction of the entire population. Mass surveillance may be done either with or without the consent of those under surveillance, and may or may not be in their interest. For example, the monitoring of the population for disease in epidemiology, would generally be viewed as a benign form of mass surveillance, but a network of secret police informers would not.

Voluntary mass surveillance

One of the most common forms of voluntary mass surveillance is carried out by commercial organisations. Many people are willing to join loyalty card programs, trading their personal information and surveillance of their shopping habits in exchange for a discount on their groceries.

Involuntary mass surveillance

As a result of the digital revolution, many aspects of life are now captured and stored in digital form. Concern has been expressed that governments may use this information to conduct mass surveillance on their populations.

United Kingdom

Amongst the western democracies, the United Kingdom is perhaps the country subject to the most surveillance. Indeed, in 2004 the Government's own Information Commissioner, talking about the proposed British national identity database stated, "My anxiety is that we don't sleepwalk into a surveillance society." Other databases causing him concern are the National Child Database, the Office for National Statistics' Citizens Information Project, and the NHS National Programme for IT. In 2004 it is estimated that the country is monitored by some four million CCTV cameras, some with a facial recognition capacity, with practically all town centres under surveillance. The British Police hold records of 5.5 million fingerprints and 2.5 million DNA samples. In London, the Oyster card payment system http://www.oystercard.com/ tracks the movement of individual people through the public transport system, while the London Congestion Charge uses computer imaging to track car number plates. There are also plans to track all road vehicles nationally using vehicle telematics systems for road charging; see vehicle excise duty.

United States

In the USA, there are concerns that the adoption of the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, which plans to collate criminal histories, driver's license data, vehicle registration records, and significant amounts of other data, will effectively revive the unfunded Total Information Awareness initiative to give centralized access to the records of the US population.

East Germany

Before the Digital Revolution, one of the world's biggest mass surveillance operations was carried out the Stasi, the secret police of the former East Germany. By the time the state collapsed in 1989, the Stasi had built up an estimated civilian network of 300,000 informants (approximately one in fifty of the population), who monitored politically "incorrect" behaviour among other citizens.